Monday, November 9, 2015

Witch elves are what makes dark elf teams so cool. They are expensive to hire and break easily, but the amount of damage they can do to your opponent's team more than makes up for this.

Witch Elf

From a modelling point of view they are really interesting too. I've always fancied Jes Goodwin's Eldar harlequins and I wanted my witch elves to look something like that.

Witch Elf

For a very long time I was struggling to find a combination of parts that I was satisfied with and I decided to scratch my first attempts. In the end I decided to use a Marauder witch elf combined with the legs of a female eldar harlequin. Since the face of the Marauder witch wasn't exactly up to Jes Goodwin standards I also used the face mask of the harlequin.

Witch Elf

The result is a witch elf in an attacking position which suits this kind of player well, I think.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Latest addition to the team is a blitzer. I wanted him to resemble the old starplayer Tuern Redvenom so I used his face mask, copied his thigh guards and combined them with the torso of one of the original blitzers.

Monday, July 13, 2015

Next player up for my dark elf team is an assassin. The fact that this player can run around stabbing his opponents in the back without risking getting caught by the referee is enough to include one, but overall I don't find this player very useful.

Dark Elf Assassin

The assassin does provide for an interesting modelling project though and I had this idea in my head that I just had to try out. I ended up using the body of an elf wardancer called Eidyn because of the very cool fighting claw he has strapped to his right arm. The head was taken from an eldar scout wearing a scarf.

Dark Elf Assassin

I green stuffed the skull on the shoulder pad as well as the towel hanging from his waist. I chose to paint the base ring green. Green is normally reserved for blockers, but since dark elves don't have any I figured that it would work as well as any other color.

Friday, May 29, 2015

I painted up this dwarf coach many years ago. Originally I had ordered a dwarf siege gun with crew from Mail Order, but since the trollz sent me a miscast gunner (with no flame) I decided to do something completely different with him and that's how he ended up as a Blood Bowl coach.

Dwarf Coach

At the time I played one of the Madden NFL games and I stole this running play from one of the playbooks in the game. The blackboard itself is made from cardboard and matchsticks.

I don't like to field unpainted miniatures and I really wanted to add some goblins to the squad so I painted up two of the old Citadel Miniatures Kev Adams goblins from the 2nd edition Blood Bowl range of miniatures. I really like these miniatures and they were a real joy to paint. So much that I'm actually considering painting up a full team at some point.

Goblin

The theme of the team is a mix of two worlds. They are of course heavily inspired by the original Orcland Raiders team, but as I wanted to add a helmet stripe I chose to paint the helmets to represent the Pittsburgh Steelers. (Not visible on these goblins).

I still need to paint up the second thrower and another lineman before this team is complete.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

I've always loved dark elves. I've played them in local leagues, tournaments and on fumbbl and I've always preferred them to their lawful wood elf and high elf cousins.

For some reason I've never painted a team of these evil elves though I've owned the miniatures for ages and it was only recently that I found out why. More on that later.

It's not that I didn't try in the past. In the early days of Blood Bowl 3rd edition I ran a dark elf squad named the Purple Reign. I painted a blitzer and that was it. I enjoyed playing the team, but I didn't enjoy painting the miniatures.

Dark Elf Blitzer

Years later I tried again. This time I wanted to recreate the 2nd edition team the Naggaroth Nightwings. Again I failed.

Naggaroth Nightwings Blitzer

The years passed and I forgot all about my beloved dark elves, but then the dark elf roster was changed as it was too similar to the high elf roster. One of the changes was the introduction of runners and though they are comparable to conventional throwers I still wanted to convert a miniature that would catch the feel of a fast elf dumping off the ball.

Dark Elf Runner

The result was a converted 2nd edition dark elf thrower with his right hand repositioned and his legs removed and replaced by the legs of an old Warhammer wardancer. His head was kindly donated by a Marauder sea elf.

Still I didn't get around to paint the team and it was only when I discovered axiom's excellent dark elf Blood Bowl team that it became apparent to me that the reason was that I just didn't like the miniatures. Normally I'm a huge fan of everything 2nd edition, but the dark elf miniatures just have so short legs that they would be better suited as chaos dwarves...

I never considered Gary Morley's 3rd edition dark elf team as they are as ugly as everything else he sculpted and not in the same league as Jes Goodwin's elf minitures that I loved to paint. How I wish that Jes had done the dark elves as well and not just Tuern Redvenom.

Like axiom I decided to take the dark path and try to create my own Jes Goodwin dark elf team. While axiom decided to base his team on the Jes Goodwin Blood Bowl elves I decided to take a different route. I rather liked the look of the uniform on the original miniatures, I just didn't like the miniature's anatomy. What I really wanted was a full squad of Tuern Redvenoms so I figured I would use the torsos of the original miniatures and combine them with some slender elf legs, much like I did on the runner.

Dark Elf Lineman

What I'm planning to do is to create som static looking linemen and some positional players in more dynamic poses. The lineman above is based on a regular lineman with his legs replaced with ones of an old Warhammer wood elf champion. His head is from the same wardancer that donated legs to the runner. To finish him off I copied the thigh guards of Tuern Redvenom and glued them onto my new lineman. I'll cover how to do this in a future blog post.

Dark Elf Linewoman

The next model I completed was initially meant to be used as one of the witch elves, but in the end I decided that the miniature was too heavily armoured to represent an amour value 7 player. I removed Tuern's head and replaced it with that of an elf cheerleader which resulted in one mean looking female dark elf. As dark elves traditionally make use of both male and female warriors in the same units I decided that she would end up being used as a linewoman.

Witch Elf

I was now the owner of a headless cheerleader so it made sense to use the long sexy legs for one of the witch elves. Again I used the torso of a thrower, but this time I replaced the right hand with a fist of a Marauder witch elf who also donated her head to the good cause.

So that's four out of sixteen done. Of course they still need to painted and I've decided to paint them black and yellow to represent the Ulthuan Renegades.